The Citizen (Dar es Salaam)
Makwaia wa Kuhenga
20 October 2008
opinion
You must have watched as I have, debates by candidates for the presidency of the United States of America. There were three in number and the last one was last week.
Watching the two men from the major political groupings in the United States, Mr. Barack Obama and John McCain from the Democratic and Republican parties respectively, you must have formed your own opinion on which man of the two made more sense to you and therefore deserving your vote had you been an American citizen.
As I watched them debate, two things came to my mind immediately. I wondered why the Tanzanian electoral system takes presidential debates optional. I also wondered why nobody has ever thought that debates are actually raw material helpful to provide voters with a personality profile of a given candidate to decide whether that candidate would actually fit the shoes he is aspiring!
What struck me as equally instructive is the exceptionally civil manner the American presidential candidates conduct themselves both in the course of the debates and at the end of it. In spite of all the unkind words the two men trade against each other in the course of the debates, yet they are careful not to appear intemperate or irrational. Perhaps it is because they know they are being assessed by voters, they try as much as possible not to appear too rude.
At the end of the debate, the two men rush to meet each other midway for a hug and handshake celebrating a battle of words well fought! This stance displayed in the Obama/McCain debate appeared very instructive to me as emulative for people elsewhere like in my own country.
It is not simply true that everything the Americans represent is 'imperialistic'. One may pick a quarrel with their fundamental path - that is that they are fundamentally capitalist and imperial in real terms in their relations with other nations of the world. But it is also true that they have virtues worth emulating such as making its possible for the electorate to make intelligible choices in the competing voices.
Now looking at the competitive politics we have in this country in the light of the last two multi-party elections, I am not sure that voters in this country have had enough information on the presidential candidates more specifically whether they have been subjected to adequate public scrutiny.
There was an attempt at a presidential debate in the first multi-party election in 1995 when I remember the Mkapa/Mrema debate at the Kilimanjaro Hotel.
But this was the only debate I can remember and to me it sounded more of an indoor mass-rally than a debate moderated by professionals with focused themes.
If anything, it was a debate craftily orchestrated by minders of one of the political parties to achieve negative results to the other side. It was not planned and organized by independent professionals aimed at achieving balanced presentation as we have seen on our television on the Obama/McCain debate.
Instead of moving to institute debates as a norm and part of the electoral process given the fact that we have both a vibrant print and electronic media with at least three nation-wide TV stations, the focus has been on useless slogans in mass rallies which are now only too common and now remembered contemptuously.
To my memory, there was practically no televised presidential candidates' debate in the last elections in 2005 except mass rallies organized by competing political parties. And I think this is a serious misnomer in that voters were denied an important assessment benchmark.
My blueprint for this theme therefore is to call upon concerned people in the legislature to correct this misnomer as a matter of urgency.
Someone should come up with a private motion to include in the Elections Act a provision providing for a mandatory televised debate by presidential candidates in all forthcoming General Elections for the very good reason such debates are indispensable to judge whether aspirants really fit the shoes they are aspiring to wear.
Makwaia wa Kuhenga is a senior journalist and author.
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